


This Ain’t a Battle (It’s a Goddamned War)

by Pollydoodles



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-05-07
Updated: 2016-05-07
Packaged: 2018-06-06 22:30:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,374
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6772882
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pollydoodles/pseuds/Pollydoodles
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is not James Barnes. </p><p>This is the monster that lives within James Barnes, and it’s snarling back at her with bared teeth and bloodlust.</p>
            </blockquote>





	This Ain’t a Battle (It’s a Goddamned War)

When she approaches him, he’s hunched and his chest is heaving – she can see that much, even from behind, from the lines of his body and the way his shoulders are tensed. She’s slowing, keeping her footsteps light but knows he can hear her anyway. When he turns it’s almost supernaturally fast and though she expects it – would expect nothing less from him – the wind is still knocked from her lungs as he grips against her throat and pushes her hard against the brick wall. 

His face is splattered with blood. Not his own, of that she’s more than sure, but the rage that’s painted across it is all his and somehow much brighter than the lashings of red that decorate his cheekbones and drip from his forehead. His eyes are hooded and he’s not looking at her, not yet – he will, she knows this and when he does they will be filled with a storm that she’s not sure it will be possible to calm this time. 

His grips tightens and she begins to choke, the edges of her vision starting to blur and darken. She’s been here before, at his hand and under others, but the familiarity doesn’t make it any easier. She scrambles against the wall, against him and manages, with breath she doesn’t quite have, to hiss out one word. 

“James.”

His only response is to squeeze tighter, the metal clenching against her throat and she knows – suspected anyway – but now it’s confirmed. This man in front of her, dark hair falling into his eyes and shirt soaked with the blood of the men she’d asked him to neutralise, the man currently engaged in pulling the very life from her lungs inch by agonising inch as she twitches uncontrollably under the weight of his arm – this is not James Barnes. 

James Barnes passed her a slice of toast at breakfast this morning. James Barnes looped an easy arm around Darcy Lewis and smiled shyly as she dropped a light kiss against his forehead. James Barnes wore an exasperated look as Steve Rogers beat him again at pool. This is not James Barnes. This man may kill her, up against this wall in an abandoned building with their friends and team mates waiting expectantly outside, unsuspecting; this man would snap her neck and wear her blood across his chest like a medal; this man would leave her broken body shattered on the floor for the rats and not even look down as he stepped over her to leave. 

This is the monster that lives within James Barnes, and it’s snarling back at her with bared teeth and bloodlust. 

She tries again, with the only thing she can think to draw on and what may well be her last breath. 

“Soldat.”

He stills. The fingers around her neck loosen minutely but enough, at least, for her to suck in air. She rolls her head back against the wall, as far as she is able to under his grip, and he crowds her. The metal grip he drops but is replaced by the length of his forearm across her throat which pins her in place firmly. She resists the urge to struggle against it, tamping down her natural inclination to do so. She’s been in this position before, it’s not the first time he’s turned on a mission and she knows, all too well, that she is no match for him. 

Not with hot blood and adrenaline pumping across him, feeding into his brain and twisting it, turning his vision into something other. Pulling apart memories and pushing him face first – fist first – into the past. His hips bump against hers and now he’s flush against her, pushing her into the brick work. She can feel a hard edge catching into the small of her back and tries in vain to shift away from it. He holds her in place. The nail – she can feel it dig in more sharply now, can tell what it is – starts to rip at her tac jacket. She can hear the material tear, feel the cold kiss of iron as it spikes into her flesh. 

His head raises, strands of dark hair dragging across her face as his eyes meet hers. He’s so close now that his breath is ghosting over her lips, the edges of his chin against hers and the stubble there almost itching against her skin. She breathes him in, can practically taste his musk and sweat and the scent of the blood that’s caught across his cheek – arterial artery, she thinks, she knows, having hit more than enough of them herself in her lifetime, knows the way that it arcs and sprays when severed – and feels an unrequested shudder roll across her body. 

He feels it too. He’s so close to her right now he’s practically in her, so of course he notices. 

“Natalia.” 

It’s a statement, not a question. It’s a command, not a name. It’s been a while since he called her that but the last time he did she was underneath him, pinned in an entirely different way. Fire had raged around them, the last vestiges of a regime they had both helped to topple melting and crashing around them as they lost themselves in passion and need. She’d been the one doused in blood then, her skin slick with it as he ran his tongue across her throat and she fisted her hands into his hair. Her hair, just as red as the blood they’d spilled together, her eyes as dark as those left unblinking in the men whose bodies surrounded them, her body flushed and wanting as he took her repeatedly against the cold, hard floor. 

His eyes are on her now, and that beast within him, the one that’s always lurking just under the surface, the one she sees in both her dreams and her nightmares, it’s looking right back at her from inside him. It growls. She can hear the challenge it’s issuing her, feel the primal shudder that rolls across his body and causes his fingers to shake. He buries them into her hip, gripping hard and she bites back the cry that forces up from her throat at the pain that strikes across, refusing to give it to him. Her eyes meet his and her own monster roars back. 

Natasha Romanova is made of stronger stuff than that. 

He made her stronger than that. 

For this is the dirty little secret that she’s carried this past year, the one that sweetens her lips and hardens her eyes, the one that she’s kept from them all but mostly from Steve. That the Black Widow knows the Winter Soldier inside and out, in every intimate way she possibly could. That he was the one that made and unmade her, the one that beat her to within an inch of her life when she missed an easy target and who laughed, deep and rich, when she begged him to do it again. 

She remembers the girl that she was. The girl that ached for him, for his touch, for the kiss of his hand hard against her, anywhere he cared to strike it. She’d been built to want for the darkness, had revelled in it until she too was made of the same. It burned inside her, coursed through her blood and darkened her eyes. She’d longed for the feel of him inside her, above her, behind her – taking her and branding her in any way that he cared to, marking her as his own. 

She remembers the man that he was. The man that had watched her fight a roomful of soldiers, beaten them and been beaten by them, until she was backed into a corner, sweat ridden and panting, blood trickling from an open cut above her eye, shirt torn and hands bruised; and said “again”. And when she’d dropped to the floor from exhaustion, been unable to fight any longer, had pulled her on top of him and wrung from her a release she had screamed out in a silent sob against the solid muscle of his shoulder. 

She justifies it in her head, the keeping of that secret and the quiet of the words she’s almost let slip, once, twice even three times to Steve who looks at the man he saved as though he’s the only lifeline in a world that’s drowning him. Especially when he looks at the man and she can see in his honest blue eyes and the odd tilt to his head that he can’t even recognise the man sat across from him, for all that he’s known that face for a century. Part of her aches to tell him why, to explain that there’s a devil wearing the skin of his best friend but the bigger part of her knows that to do so is to expose her own devil and show them how they two are born of the same demons, made in fire and blood and unable to ever let that go. 

She justifies it when she’s eyeing Barnes across the breakfast table, when one hand steals to the handgun strapped as ever to her thigh and strokes it, unthinking. When he loses his temper at the television, when he wakes in the night sweat-soaked and wild-eyed; she hears him and she clutches at that gun. She knows, better than anyone else, the man that lurks within, the beast that stalks them all behind blue eyes. She tallies that knowledge, in her mind, weighs it and believes that if she has to she will put a bullet in his brain and not hesitate to do so. She tells herself that she is the only one who she can trust to do it. 

In the here and the now, his warm breath across her lips as he scans her face like an animal, his dark hair curled across his handsome face and the cut of his cheekbones highlighted in the shadow and gloom, she is not so sure. 

“Natalia.” 

He says it again, and it’s lower this time but not softer, his lips almost brushing the curve of her throat and she stiffens as a single bead of sweat rolls its way from the sharp edge of her jawline and eases down her shivering skin. It kisses past his lips, an intimate little movement that would be a lover’s touch for anyone else. There is no softness in this man. They beat it out of him long ago, strapped him to a table and sent wave after wave of electricity through his brain until it was so scrambled they could take it out and reshape it to what they wanted it to be. 

They taught him to do it to others. 

He chose to do it to her. 

She closes her eyes, unbidden, and remembers the creak of battered leather as he tightened the straps across her. Smells the singe in the air that tells her he has burned across her skin, knows the marks will last a lifetime and more. Feels the shudder inside her very veins as her body jerks and twists against the cool kiss of the metal table and the fizz of the electricity that he sends through her repeatedly. Tastes the edge of his release and hers as he twists her body on that table in an entirely different way, not bothering to loosen the straps to do it. 

He twists his head to look at her properly, adjusting the angle of his forearm against her throat and she can feel her pulse ricocheting off the metal as it squeezes into her. It’s warm now, has stolen the heat from her skin and feels almost human as it forces her head up. She sets her jaw, eyes hard, because this she knows he expects from her and nothing less. He may take her life, here in this dark little place buried under the remains of an abandoned building, where the echo of her dying breath would fade long before it reached the spring sunshine outside, but he would tear the flesh from her bones whilst she still lived to watch him do it if he saw any weakness in the girl he’d carefully built. 

She is prepared to die here. 

She is prepared to die by his hand. 

She has been prepared for that eventuality since the day that he struck her across the face without even looking back at her, the day that she missed her target. She did not make that mistake again, not with him. The Winter Soldier brooked no argument, accepted no failure. It was the way he’d been made and he would not allow anything less from her. 

Instead he drops his forehead to her shoulder, pulling aside the thick material of her body suit as though it were silk and gossamer and nothing more than that. She feels a deep shuddering sigh that fills his body and hers as it rumbles across him. She feels wet lips against her bare skin as his mouth moves, independent to his brain. To anyone happening upon them – unlucky though they would be – would assume a lovers embrace but Natasha knows better. 

This is not a kiss. 

The Winter Soldier has never kissed her. Not even as he was buried inside her and groaning his release with hot breath, fisting a gloved hand into her wild red hair and her thighs gripping tight against his own. Not even with her lithe dancer’s body pliable and taut above him, riding hard and their sweat mingled together. Not even as he took her from behind, pushed her body up against the door to his cell, bruising her hips with his hands and gripping tight whilst he drove her to completion. 

Not even when she finally bested him for the first time, swinging her legs up and around his shoulders, twisting in the air just-so to tip his weight against him, and finally slamming him into the hardwood floor. He’d laughed then, a short sharp bark of sound, as though he’d forgotten what it was. It was harsh against the silence and devoid of humour, reluctantly given as though she’d stolen that from his lungs as well as his breath. 

He’d pinned her after that, driving into her again and again whilst she cried out underneath him, only half in ecstasy as he grunted above her and pulled her thighs around his waist. His metal fist had hammered into the floorboards as he moved, beating out a rhythm against the wooden panels that kept time with his cock thrusting inside her. She’d looked up at him, dark hair falling across his face, eyes angled away from her – always away from her – and she’d known that this was punishment as much as reward. 

For her or for him, she could not say. 

The guards had stood and watched outside the door, peering in with unimpressed faces through the cracked and brown-stained glass as their asset took his own relief. He’d not even dropped his trousers, just pulled himself out, pumped hard into his fist and then into her. Finally spilling inside her, jerking and snapping his hips as his fist slammed against the floor for a last time he’d rolled away even as his cock still spluttered and dripped its release. She’d lain on the floor, trousers torn and in a careless pile at her feet, bare to the world, thighs splattered with the remains of him and staring up at the high ceiling without seeing what she was looking at. 

He’d said just one word as he walked away, and without having to raise her head or twist her body to see, she’d known in her bones that he’d not been looking as he said it. 

“Good.”

No, the Winter Soldier had never kissed her and he wasn’t kissing her now. What she could feel skating across the sharp jut of her collarbone was James Barnes wetly tracing his name, rank and number. Joining the wet of his lips and the tongue that danced warily over her cooling skin were salted tears that dripped from his cheekbones and mingled with the slide of saliva that he was drawing over her. 

Forcing an arm up from the crush of his body on hers, she tangled it into the soft hair at the back of his head and stroked. His forearm pulled back from her throat and she sucked in a lungful of sweet air, grateful and relieved all at the same time. He breathed against her, sucking his lips together over her skin and she struggled the other arm out from under him, looping it around his waist and hugging tightly. 

She was aware that the blood that had decorated his pretty face was now smeared across her own. She was aware that he had moved on from tracing out his name and was now just sobbing quietly into the crook of her shoulder, head bent and eyes squeezed shut. His mouth was open slightly, lips wet and sliding over her as his body shook against hers. 

Her grip in his hair tightened, a short sharp shock to try and bring him back to himself. She unwound her arm from his waist, let go of his hair, pushed at his shoulders and he sank to his knees in front of her. Head still bent, body shuddering and she could see the tears dripping from his face and splashing against the battered and torn trousers that strained over his muscular thighs. 

He looks broken. 

He is broken. 

The silence between them is punctuated by her deep breaths and his quiet sobs, wet and echoing against the dirty brick walls that surround them. And then by the snap of the holster at her thigh, and the sharp release of the safety catch on the gun she carries. He looks up at her slowly, at the gun that’s now pointed at the dead centre of his forehead and he leans himself against the muzzle of the gun. His eyes close as he takes a deep breath, then blue eyes open slowly – oh god, so slowly – and fix upon her. 

She braces herself, feet apart and finger already slipping across the trigger, caressing it as she would a lover. 

“Do it.” 

His voice rasps, low and husky in the darkness and his eyes are still on her face, drinking in every aspect of her from the crease of her eyebrows, the line in her eyes as she looks down on him, body bent and submissive on his knees at her feet, as though she were God meting out punishment to Lucifer. A fitting comparison, she thinks, fleetingly. After all, God loved Lucifer more than anything else and the brightest angel in the heavens had, in turn, fallen further than anyone else ever could. 

“End this.” He says, voice stronger now. She can see the tracks of tears as they’ve made their trail through the blood and dirt on his face. His blue eyes are clear, no trace of the devil that snarled and bit at her, who had been itching to lick at her broken bones and dance to the sound of the snap of her neck under his hands. Hands that he now places behind his back, clasped together as they would be had he been facing a firing squad. 

The firing squad he was begging her to be. 

“No.” She says roughly, jerking back and sliding the safety catch on, pushing the gun back into the holster strapped to her thigh all in one movement, too quick for him to register properly. She grasps at his shoulder, the one still made of flesh and bone, digging her fingertips in hard to get purchase on him and he stumbles as she hauls him to his feet. 

“The world isn’t done with you yet, James Barnes.” She twists away from him, leaving him swaying as he stood, head bent and blue eyes filled with confusion and pain, then throws him one last thing over her shoulder, head turned but face obscured by a cloud of auburn hair. “I am not fit to make judgement on you, anyway.”


End file.
